As bandwidth needs increase throughout the telecommunications arena, the industry is being forced to look beyond 10Gbit/s data rates to 40 and even 100 Gigabit throughputs. Such high performance forces the use of acceleration features on the hardware as well as the use of bare metal operating systems to best-utilize all available processor cores. This white paper looks at the risks involved in the development of such systems, as well as how the use of Abaco Systems ATCA blades and 6WINDGate software can mitigate those risks.